The Elegant Variation: EDWARD HIRSCH'S SPECIAL ORDERS

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March 25, 2008

EDWARD HIRSCH'S SPECIAL ORDERS

One of the best parts about our recent Titlepage appearance was it gave us an excuse to acquaint ourselves with Edward Hirsch and his poetry. We don't write about poetry nearly as often as we should around here (even as we feel reading poetry is essential for novelists who care about language), mostly because others do that way, way better and we can't always say much more than "we know what we like," but we sure do like Hirsch's new collection Special Orders a great deal and we commend it to your attention. Hirsch, currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, has written a moving, elegaic volume that looks both behind and forward, and he will say much of interest about it when our episode airs.

In the meantime, here is "More Than Halfway," one of our favorites, and the poem which gives its name to the first half of the collection:

I've turned on lights all over the house,
but nothing can save me from this darkness.

I've stepped onto the front porch to see
the stars perforating the milky black clouds

and the moon staring coldly through the trees,
but this negative I'm carrying inside me.

Where is the boy who memorized constellations?
Where is the textbook that so consoled him?

I'm now more than halfway to the grave,
but I'm not half the man I meant to become.

To what fractured deity can I pray?
I'm willing to pay the night with interest,

though the night wants nothing but itself.
What did I mean to say to darkness?

Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest.
God is an absence whispering in the leaves.

Hirsch is also the author of the popular How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which Daniel Menaker highly recommended to us and is now on order. Finally, you should check out this 2006 NPR interview, in which Hirsch shares William Matthews's list of the "Four Subjects of Poetry," which we reproduce with considerable delight:

"1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.

2. We're not getting any younger.

3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.

4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what."

Posted at 12:01 AM in Worthy Titles | Permalink

Comments

Beautiful poem. Reminds me of Philip Larkin.

Posted by: Patrick Stephenson | March 25, 2008 at 09:53 AM

You should definitely check out two of Hirsch's earlier collections--"Wild Gratitude" and "For the Sleepwalkers" Both are marked by some really extraordinary poems. "Sleepwalkers" in particular, is very impressive.

And yes, he's a good guy. I met him at Breadloaf a couple of years back. It was a real pleasure. He even put a little personal "geez, I'm sorry" note on my Guggenheim rejection letter. Now that's class!

Posted by: Martha Southgate | March 26, 2008 at 06:50 PM

I just read Hirsh's How To Read A Poem, and loved it.

It's now sitting happily on my bookcase next to Koch's Making Your Own Days.

Im supposing they're swapping couplets - passionately and giddily, respectively.

Posted by: will amato | March 28, 2008 at 07:21 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
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The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

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*Now in Paperback*

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 25, 2008

EDWARD HIRSCH'S SPECIAL ORDERS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 25, 2008

EDWARD HIRSCH'S SPECIAL ORDERS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism